Silence is Not an Option

Born and raised in Poland, I assumed my mother’s Holocaust burden.

It is said that in every survivor’s family, one child is unconsciously chosen to be a “memorial candle,” to carry on the mourning and to dedicate his or her life to the memory of the Shoah. That child takes part in the parents’ emotional world, assumes the burden, and becomes the link between past and future. I realize now that my mother chose me to be that candle.

The author (L) and her mother (R)

My mother was forever haunted by her loved one’s images. She saw them starved and frozen in the streets of the Warsaw ghetto. She saw them in the cattle cars that took them to the Treblinka death camp. She escaped Warsaw in order to save herself, only to be captured and enslaved by the brutal Stalinist regime. Surviving in the remote corners of Russia, extraordinary courage and the hope of reunion with her family, kept her alive. In 1946, almost a year after the war ended, she was allowed to leave Russia, forced to settle in southwestern Poland. Still hoping to be reunited with her lost siblings, she made her way to Warsaw – only to witness the city’s devastation and the annihilation of her family.

My mother never stopped mourning.

My mother never forgave herself for saving her own life and abandoning them to the horrible deaths that followed. She never stopped mourning.

My parents’ huge losses were more than I could fathom. In time I came to realize it is impossible to recover from such a tragedy. They carried on with their lives, but the Holocaust was being played out in their minds every day. Understanding this became crucial in my understanding of myself.

I grew up in Poland, in a home where my sister and I experienced my parents’ daily quirks. I sensed my mother’s abandonment and helplessness. I felt her fears and resignation. I lived with her rituals, where every crumb of bread was important, where fear of being cold was magnified, and where suspicion of others, and secretiveness and mistrust ruled everything she did. Her scars became my scars.

Growing up in these shadows made me a witness to what had happened. Sometimes I was sympathetic. Other times I was filled with contempt – angry and overwhelmed at being connected to my mother’s ongoing grief.

Exotic Adventures

I tried to understand how my parents’ family could just be gone, completely gone. My mother visibly mourned her five nieces and nephews, repeating often, with emotion, “So young and innocent. They should be among the living. They were all taken away and murdered.” I grieved with her.

And yet, I could not truly comprehend how her family was gone. I had never seen any photographs, concrete images that my mother once had an extended family. I was frightened, confused and ashamed that I did not believe my mother. In my heart I was sad, but in my mind I believed that her family had never existed.

I was also envious of my mother’s incredible adventures. Overwhelmed by the tragedy, I found that I could feel safe by focusing on her Russian stories. I loved the glimpses of hope and excitement that my imagination turned into exotic tales. I pictured her living in a foreign place, riding camels under the hot desert sun. I never imagined her sick or hungry. From those early childhood stories I decided I wanted to be like her, to travel and visit unusual and faraway places where she was heroic and a pillar of strength.

I also did not understand my mother’s fearful and anxious behavior. I remember her being especially tense during Christian and Jewish holidays. She seemed to want to make us invisible. This was a time to stay indoors, to be mistrustful, afraid of a possible mob mentality. The baffling, unexplained, anxious behavior only intensified the fear in my child’s imagination.

This was a time to stay indoors, to be mistrustful, afraid of a possible mob mentality.

In Poland, where I grew up, people had a deeply rooted belief that Jews were responsible for killing Christ. Christmas and Easter were times of great fear for Jews. The Jewish holiday of Passover was a time of anxiety, too. The widespread rumor was that matzah was made with the blood of Christian children. It was not until I got to the United States and was in college that I learned that Jesus was a Jew who was crucified by the Romans. To this day I do not have any emotional attachment to holidays, but now at least I understand how this disconnection came about.

Begging for Mercy

My very first memory is the sensation of fear. The Holocaust left in its path a darkness and despair that enveloped the consciousness of both survivors and their children. I am convinced that the fear my mother experienced was passed on to me through the sinewy strands of chemical inheritance known as genes. I was born being afraid.

As a child I had an abnormal fear of people. When people came to our home I hid under the large kitchen table covered with a linen cloth that reached to the floor. I refused to come out until the guests departed.

When I was five years old, our town held army maneuvers in the city square right in front of our house. Although I understood they were just exercises for showing off the Polish army, I was traumatized. Was my over-sensitivity that day to the sharp sounds of gunfire and tanks rolling through the streets related to my mother surviving the bombing of Warsaw?

At age six, my mother took me to an art exhibit that had come to our town. The exhibit was a tribute to mothers and children who suffered during the war. The art showed SS soldiers ripping children from mothers’ arms and killing them. Mothers being killed. Mothers begging for mercy. My mother cried bitterly as we walked through the exhibit. I was overwhelmed both by her tears and because the art was frightening. When I think back to that day, I realize my mother probably thought I was too young to understand. Yet her tears were enough for me to absorb the horror of what was depicted.

The next morning I woke up hallucinating. SS soldiers were standing on each side of my bed. I was not allowed to move. If I did, they had orders to shoot me. I remained motionless, afraid to breathe until my mother came looking for me. I never burdened her with my terrifying waking dream, because I remembered how she cried that day.

“You are Jewish. Poland is not your country. Palestine is where you belong.”

At age seven I learned that being Jewish meant that I was different from my Polish friends. My first day of school began happily enough, but as I approached the school I was confronted by some classmates who proceeded to taunt me. “You are Jewish. Poland is not your country. Palestine is where you belong.” I didn’t understand. This was the first time I’d heard that my home was in Palestine. It also was the first time I realized that being Jewish and Polish could not coexist. The day that began so happily dragged on. I could not wait to run home.

I was crying as I opened our kitchen door. My mother sat with me by the kitchen window and explained what it meant to be Jewish. I remember the sadness in her voice and the tears in her eyes. But I kept thinking how our true homeland was in Palestine. My response was a simple one: “Let’s go where we belong.”

We would often go to the train station to say goodbye to friends leaving for Israel or America. Why not us? I was angry with my parents for their choice to stay behind. Only as an adult did I discover my parents’ secret why we did not leave Poland. My father had contracted tuberculosis in Saratov in 1940 and we were denied entry to other countries because of his illness. Even Israel would not accept him because of the advanced stage of tuberculosis. We could not leave until he died at age 49. My parents concealed the seriousness of his health. Only my sister, four years older than me, finally figured out the reason. I never did. I mostly saw them as weak, indecisive and helpless.

My father, Abram Ejbuszyc, was silent about his past. He never uttered a word about what happened to him during the war or even about his life before the war. I cannot help but wonder if this was a form of self-imposed punishment. My father detached himself and didn’t talk, as if afraid to make a close connection and lose loved ones again. He sought to contain his trauma within himself and spare his children. He lived behind a wall of silence. That was his shelter. He took his burden to the grave.

New Land

In New York, we each went in different directions, and the family that we had been in Poland disintegrated. Our lives became turbulent as our notions of how things should be collided. My mother worked in a factory. She got up at six in the morning and took the one-hour subway ride from the Bronx to Manhattan. With an address scribbled on a piece of paper, she managed to ask for directions and got to work and back home again. She was a fighter and a survivor. She was not going to succumb to her fears. She was determined to make the best life possible for herself. And so, at age 50, after working in a factory all day long, she enrolled in night school and soon became fluent in English. I watched her navigate through her new life, never giving up. She did not burden us with her fears and problems; those she buried deep inside. Two years later she was working in a bank.

I had to return to Poland. I was looking for something, a piece of me I had left behind.

I took classes at City College in the department of Jewish studies. One of my professors was the author and survivor Elie Wiesel. In those classes I realized the importance of my mother’s story. I persuaded her to write about her tragic life. My mother listened. She understood the importance of history and of remembering, not just with regard to the Holocaust but also for the Jewish legacy in Eastern Europe. She wrote her story in Polish. Yet I did not share those writings with her. Somehow we never had the time to journey and emerge together from her trauma as adults.

After I became an American citizen, I went back to Poland in 1972. I was still haunted by the memories of our departure from Poland when my mother was inconsolable. I had to return. I was looking for something, a piece of me I had left behind. I had a nostalgia for my homeland, and the belief that my father was calling me back to the tiny, overgrown Jewish cemetery where he was buried. The ghosts of my past were clamoring for some attention.

I traveled through Europe and Israel. I lived in the desert, under the hot sun, in a tent. By 1979 I moved to the West Coast, far away from my mother in New York. I saw her a few times a year and we talked on the phone every week. I often remembered how, as a child, all I ever wanted was to follow in my mother’s footsteps. I wanted to go to exotic and far away places. I turned her stories about surviving in Russia into heroic journeys. Traveling made me feel courageous like my mother. She passed down to me her pessimism about life, suspicion of others, and assumptions about everything turning out for the worst.

Traveling, however, put me in touch with my mother’s strengths. It temporarily wiped out the negative themes that played on in my mind. While on the road, surrounded by unusual, new places, I was happy and at home. At the same time I had an overwhelming fear of putting down roots. I did not want to have them severed as my mother had.

“We must bear witness,” Elie Wiesel said.

The trauma of loss, the disconnection from community, and my frightened family all influenced how I chose to live my life. Like other children of survivors, I developed a self-preservation defense. I built a wall around myself to protect me from my traumatic childhood. I was torn between letting go and staying connected. At times my mother’s gloom was too intense, but I continually found myself being pulled back into her world anyhow. My conscience would not allow anything else.

On the day of my mother’s death in 2006 I found a box containing the pages of her diary, covering 30 years of her life. In a thin, shaky handwriting she recalled heart-searing memories that began in Warsaw in 1917 and ended with WWII, her return to Poland after surviving throughout remote corners of Soviet Russia. When my mother died, I first contacted Elie Wiesel. He encouraged me to start translating the memoir and not be afraid of the journey ahead. We need to rescue stories like this from obscurity and share them with future generations. “We must bear witness,” he said. “Silence is not an option.”

I was now ready to confront the ghosts of my childhood. And ultimately I came to understand how growing up with the trauma of Holocaust was transmitted from my parents to me, their “memorial candle.”

Visitor Comments: 12

Yes, children of survivors absorb and self-protect from their parent(s) - a kind of osmosis and response that requires taking steps to heal.

Some dedicate to a kind of mission in response such as wanting to prevent the Holocaust from happening again. I find as a rule people's behaviors don't change that much in spite of its lessons.

The best medicine for healing is loving Israel!

And to participate and partake in Jewish life, in Jewish community and the study of our Torah. We cannot, must not have our identity defined by enemies but through how we lead our lives in connection to what we are within.

The author's tome about her mother's emotional landscape is reflective of my mother who survived with no family just the daugher she gave birth to in the Shoah and through miracles lived!.

I don't went the "chemicalization" fear that has me in its grip when I read materials on the Shoah such as this.which has in writing aspects of my mother, clarifies them.

Now what? Words aren't everything.

(8)
H.E.Brown,
July 31, 2012 12:52 AM

Silence & Mourning

I have seen the pictures of the Holocaust.
The children especially catch my eye.
Down deep in my heart they cause me to mourn even though they are not my childern, or maybe they are in some way.
I lost my Love ( my wife) of 49 years to cancer in 2009, yet down deep I still mourn for her, you never down down deep ever stop mourning for your true Love.
Unless you are really cold hearted like some can be, the Nazi's and the like, you will mourn.
Good people will mourn and will not be silent.
This is why I'm writing now.
Go ahead and mourn, BUT DON'T KEEP SILENT.

Anonymous,
August 12, 2012 4:06 PM

Silence & Mourning

Hi H.E. Brown, thank you for this compassionate note, we are all brothers and sisters and as human being we are all connected.
S.

(7)
Anonymous,
July 30, 2012 12:57 AM

Face Book Support Group - Children of Holocaust Survivors

There is a Face Book Support Group entitled "Children of Holocaust Survivors." You may wish to join where you can share your stories and your emotions with other survivor's children and grandchildren.

(6)
Anonymous,
July 30, 2012 12:55 AM

Share your feelings...

I had a very very similar experience only with my father. I have the same feelings - I have taken on his goal; his pain and sorrow. I wrote a book containing his holocaust memories (he too left tons of pages and cassette tapes that contained bits of his story. It took me 5 years but I transcribed them and now his story is published - out there hopefully forever for people to see that he did have a thriving huge family - 99% murdered in the holocaust.
I share all this to encourage you to continue and share your mother's story with the world. Every story must be told - these people were thriving human beings with full lives.
I hope you can find peace and 'closure' of some sort as you endeavor to begin this painful challenging journey.

Anonymous,
August 12, 2012 4:12 PM

Share your feelings

Yes every story must be told, preserved for future generations and used as a learning tool.
S.

(5)
Anonymous,
July 26, 2012 12:35 PM

I want to say a few words on Suzanna Eibuzyc's "Silence is not an Option."

Well, to start with I must admit that this is quite a touching story, and when I read it I felt quite saddened and inspired to post my manuscript upon its completion. The manuscript is titled "The Mirror of My Life." I experienced a similar though not so closely related situation which I feel I should share with others. It is my promise that once I through with the editing part of it, I will post same.
Thanks for your story Suzzie.
Wellington

(4)
Keila,
July 25, 2012 1:29 AM

Wow. so much to sort through

Wow. so beautiful the way you see yourself as a candle, transmitting the light of your mother's experience. So much to contend with and to reflect on. Your mother experienced so much trauma and by default you experience it as well. You both sound like fighters and have the courage to move forward. Clearly your mother transmitted her love for her children, along with much of the pain and trauma she experienced. May her strength and courage be an inspiration to you and to the Jewish nation and nations of the world.

Anonymous,
August 12, 2012 4:15 PM

so much to sort through

Thank you for your kind words, it makes it easier to keep going when I get messages like yours.
S.

(3)
Christian Yuliandi,
July 23, 2012 8:18 AM

Our parents are human beings like us

Yes, our parents are human beings, sometimes we forgot that. I am a man, have different story with my parents. As a Chinese Indonesian and a Roman Catholic, my race and my religion also had history of persecution. Thus basically I could sympatize with what was experienced by you and your parents. We sometimes feels that our parents are superheroes, superhumans, but deep within they are just human beings, with fears, worries, etc. We should learn from that, learn to be a better human, a better parents and grandparents...

(2)
ruth housman,
July 22, 2012 5:12 PM

one candle

I see the small letter 'i' in English as a candle and that we, being I and also having eyes, have a responsibility to light the way for others because love is transmitted through living memory and the desire to stop, to put an end to senseless brutality and hate. We must confront the past in order to change or attempt to transmute a story into never again. To be mute is not an option.
For a true believer like me, we have the mandate: man and woman 'date' with destiny requiring we move forward with love, to aim to respect diversity, to build bridges across the chasm of was to bring us all toward actualizing an ancient dream of world peace. Be your own messiah as together we can do this, being transcendentally One.

(1)
Emily,
July 22, 2012 2:45 PM

understanding our parents sorrows

Although my mother's life was far from the painful one of your mother's, she had a troubled childhood that effected her relationships as an adult. Often the recipient of her temperment, I could not understand why. I spent most of my life wishing my mother understood me more. Shortly before she died, my mother confided much of her childhood sorrow to me. I have spent the remaining years of my life wishing that I had understood my mother more. I think you have completed that same journey as well as keeping your mother's journey alive by translating her writings. God Bless your mother and you.

I'm told that it's a mitzvah to become intoxicated on Purim. This puzzles me, because to my understanding, it is not considered a good thing to become intoxicated, period.

One of the characteristics of the at-risk youth is their use of drugs, including alcohol. In my experience, getting drunk doesn't reveal secrets. It makes people act stupid and irresponsible, doing things they would never do if they were sober. Also, I know a lot about the horrible health effects of abusing alcohol, because I work at a research center that focuses on addiction and substance abuse.

Also, I am an alcoholic, which means that if I drink, very bad things happen. I have not had a drink in 22 years, and I have no intention of starting now. Surely there must be instances where a person is excused from the obligation to drink. I don't see how Judaism could ever promote the idea of getting drunk. It just doesn't seem right.

The Aish Rabbi Replies:

Putting aside for a moment all the spiritual and philosophical reasons for getting drunk on Purim, this remains an issue of common sense. Of course, teenagers should be warned of the dangers of acute alcohol ingestion. Of course, nobody should drink and drive. Of course, nobody should become so drunk to the point of negligence in performing mitzvot. And of course, a recovering alcoholic should not partake of alcohol on Purim.

Indeed, the Code of Jewish Law explicitly says that if one suspects the drinking may affect him negatively, then he should NOT drink.

Getting drunk on Purim is actually one of the most difficult mitzvot to do correctly. A person should only drink if it will lead to positive spiritual results - e.g. under the loosening affect of the alcohol, greater awareness will surface of the love for God and Torah found deep in the heart. (Perhaps if we were on a higher spiritual level, we wouldn't need to get drunk!)

Yet the Talmud still speaks of an obligation on Purim of "not knowing the difference between Blessed is Mordechai and Cursed is Haman." How then should a person who doesn't drink get the point of “not knowing”? Simple - just go to sleep! (Rama - OC 695:2)

All this applies to individuals. But the question remains - does drinking on Purim adversely affect the collective social health of the Jewish community?

The aversion to alcoholism is engrained into Jewish consciousness from a number of Biblical and Talmudic sources. There are the rebuking words of prophets - Isaiah 28:1, Hosea 3:1 with Rashi, and Amos 6:6, and the Zohar says that "The wicked stray after wine" (Midrash Ne'alam Parshat Vayera).

It is well known that the rate of alcoholism among Jews has historically been very low. Numerous medical, psychological and sociological studies have confirmed this. The connection between Judaism and sobriety is so evident, that the following conversation is reported by Lawrence Kelemen in "Permission to Receive":

When Dr. Mark Keller, editor of the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, commented that "practically all Jews do drink, and yet all the world knows that Jews hardly ever become alcoholics," his colleague, Dr. Howard Haggard, director of Yale's Laboratory of Applied Physiology, jokingly proposed converting alcoholics to the Jewish religion in order to immerse them in a culture with healthy attitudes toward drinking!

Perhaps we could suggest that it is precisely because of the use of alcohol in traditional ceremonies (Kiddush, Bris, Purim, etc.), that Jews experience such low rates of alcoholism. This ceremonial usage may actually act like an inoculation - i.e. injecting a safe amount that keeps the disease away.

Of course, as we said earlier, all this needs to be monitored with good common sense. Yet in my personal experience - having been in the company of Torah scholars who were totally drunk on Purim - they acted with extreme gentleness and joy. Amid the Jewish songs and beautiful words of Torah, every year the event is, for me, very special.

Adar 12 marks the dedication of Herod's renovations on the second Holy Temple in Jerusalem in 11 BCE. Herod was king of Judea in the first century BCE who constructed grand projects like the fortresses at Masada and Herodium, the city of Caesarea, and fortifications around the old city of Jerusalem. The most ambitious of Herod's projects was the re-building of the Temple, which was in disrepair after standing over 300 years. Herod's renovations included a huge man-made platform that remains today the largest man-made platform in the world. It took 10,000 men 10 years just to build the retaining walls around the Temple Mount; the Western Wall that we know today is part of that retaining wall. The Temple itself was a phenomenal site, covered in gold and marble. As the Talmud says, "He who has not seen Herod's building, has never in his life seen a truly grand building."

Some people gauge the value of themselves by what they own. But in reality, the entire concept of ownership of possessions is based on an illusion. When you obtain a material object, it does not become part of you. Ownership is merely your right to use specific objects whenever you wish.

How unfortunate is the person who has an ambition to cleave to something impossible to cleave to! Such a person will not obtain what he desires and will experience suffering.

Fortunate is the person whose ambition it is to acquire personal growth that is independent of external factors. Such a person will lead a happy and rewarding life.

With exercising patience you could have saved yourself 400 zuzim (Berachos 20a).

This Talmudic proverb arose from a case where someone was fined 400 zuzim because he acted in undue haste and insulted some one.

I was once pulling into a parking lot. Since I was a bit late for an important appointment, I was terribly annoyed that the lead car in the procession was creeping at a snail's pace. The driver immediately in front of me was showing his impatience by sounding his horn. In my aggravation, I wanted to join him, but I saw no real purpose in adding to the cacophony.

When the lead driver finally pulled into a parking space, I saw a wheelchair symbol on his rear license plate. He was handicapped and was obviously in need of the nearest parking space. I felt bad that I had harbored such hostile feelings about him, but was gratified that I had not sounded my horn, because then I would really have felt guilty for my lack of consideration.

This incident has helped me to delay my reactions to other frustrating situations until I have more time to evaluate all the circumstances. My motives do not stem from lofty principles, but from my desire to avoid having to feel guilt and remorse for having been foolish or inconsiderate.

Today I shall...

try to withhold impulsive reaction, bearing in mind that a hasty act performed without full knowledge of all the circumstances may cause me much distress.

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